my poetry

23:37

Like a little god, checking my code,

pulling and pulling on the window,

but still stuck in the coldness of reinvented softwood

Sometimes I lay my head down on my desk

and pretend that it’s the chest of some ancestor

or the gates of a shrine

or candles

Candles used to live for me,

finding me through the sweet sibilance of maternity

and bestowing upon me another year of smoke

to be set free by my vowels

But now

00:12

This pheasant hides in the shower

with the broken tug-of-war light

and nocturnal sun bleached onto the window

For the seventh night this month I believe that

shampoo on rashes will bring me back,

and I look at him and I feel the heat as it

lights me up again.

Just for a second.

Bear the fruits to me in the pigment of your arms

and keep the passionate shade between

your little god and those cling film eyes

which only ever look away from the body

I take to your acne like a Frenchman in Stockholm

and use it as a model for my shivering bones

00:41

I’ve become accustomed to crushing aspiration.

I retreat to my bed and let the heat

scour my body and desert it in pandemonium,

then I read journeys of black script

until my new envy castrates me

What more can I do to become you?

Porn on my laptop, poetry on my lap:

the heads and tails of

unshakeable regret

01:04

If red and green are just the same colour

then how can you live and love

Little creeper, come slyly into the city,

Into the blind iris with your mold

We hear you everywhere but I can only see

Absent forestry

Whistling corridors

You like a paradox

involving some jester

believing that bars

are just for the rags

But my weight is political

My gender is a competition

And writing is /////////////////////// just glasses

and not a

lock pick

My fatigue summons me to the cemetery

Of cells

And cells

And bodies that exist in quantum potential

But still surrender to warships and worship

And the silly codes of their poured stone

Which only wants to wash it away

How do I even start?

Do I walk

you from

the inuits

all the way to the sun

Or is it enough to get a jersey, put you in it,

And whisper a name into your pillow?

Your name is the debt which you will pay

Through empty bathrooms and hunger

Which desires itself

‘Thus spoke Spring’

The pitch is a box now: old t-shirt

weird colouring book

does it matter?

They’ll just want to open their new box and

Spirits will go to waste in your indecision,

Every time I try and make myself into a poem

And hold it in my hand, when I try and look

Over the lands through which I have passed

I always find myself stuck in white corners

First was the shower, the one that promised

To wash me away, but instead forced me to

Stare at the tri-legged spider, mutilating my

Every introspection until my rings turned grey

Second was the night I found control, and

Hunted his concept through auditoriums

And towers of potential, hoping to reach the

Complaisant crevices reciprocating pale legs

Third was the wall in the room between me

And the moon, a cold relationship forced

Into three lines by a mind that supposedly

Can never understand the way the world is

Is it embarrassing to say that it shakes me

To remember the eternity of parallel lines?

I’m not referring to my love or my affection

But merely the mirror mazes and Samsara

Nevertheless, I will follow the sun across

The timezones, wet a burning finger

And wear these circles till I turn

I wish the world could have ended when summer did,

In turtles of fields which tried to put me into yellow pages.

Some days you’re a tremor around my waist,

Others you’ve wrapped my blanket around your chest,

And the only thing I can do is beg for doors and windows.

Your white daydreams were never stronger than mine,

But all I wanted was for you to try and pretend that

Your eyes never turned me pink when it got black.

Yesterday’s sickness, stuck in another country, getting

Metaphysical as I follow fingers and see the son of God.

Today, I walk past your window again, reach to take the

Rock out my shoe and realise it’s stuck in my throat.

Tomorrow, just you, you and her, her and them, and them.

My yellow robes still have to be bleached, and stains of

Red never go away, they just infinitely burn against the

Flatter half of my chest, where watercolour lives in fear.

She in every song, God in every hymn, you in all of history:

I’ll tell you what it means to be a human

I’ll tell you with the contours on reluctant fossils

And a runny nose that’s had me sniffing all day

Well, there were only 3 days I had the chance

But I’ve collected them, all 116 of them:

Little perfumes in my selfish magazine

The first, only Winter, that was the day the

Two craters sunk their teeth into the meadows

And promised that they were merely verbs

The curtains shut the moon fly trap away

So I planted my head between skin and silk

All material is skin without eyes anyway

Next, mid-June, when my leg bled as it

Dragged on the carpet, the metal, the wood

But Prometheus stayed in his histories

Finally, the next Winter, it was all stuffy

But I kept the curtains and windows shut

And searched for air in the graphic tee: the

Tongue. Despite never licking its own wounds

It never trapped itself between purple lips

And instead gave me a boy that I could be

Deodorant sprayed by under-sleeve bruises

Iron forgiveness like chasms by lawnmowers

Pepperoni or something imitating maturity

When two craters handed themselves in

And pleaded that they were merely verbs

The day I met you

Stubble on clear skin

Growing into wheat

I think we were there yesterday

The mountains were taller then

So you hid in the dirt

And the water in my eyes built the ladder

And the water in my pants made you climb

When you arrived

They forced you to scratch your

Fingernails in my soil

So you couldn’t play your harp anymore

And I washed away on golden mountains

Because you told me you loved them

But what you really loved was the

Possibility of slipping and coming

Back to your little town, little nightlight

I wake up, mosquito night: another wet dream.

I’ve always envied how they can live for a week,

And leave without knowing how little they suck.

Most have the privilege of the country, so they

Love more than me or you have the chance to.

I walk outside to find my wooden hut, but my

Naked skin catches the red ant by the sandpit:

How the night never fails to administer a dose

Of its face on all it sees, I will never understand.

Stinging, exhilarating, its face and mine in mud.

Now the ladybug promises to surrender itself to

Whatever cause brings about a mirror of itself

In your desert-white cheek. Do you quake then,

Remembering how we can’t have what cats do?

No, your face too is wedded to any silent mud.

A ladybug is a cheap metaphor, a mere year of

Longing can survive without being nocturnal.

For purity, my hands search your back, there it is!

The constellation I found in my time of blindness.

I read it like a pact, push it to my neck, admit it

From dry lips, but all I can feel is the cardboard,

Thick as guilt, lining my mouth. My wet dream

Was of you killing yourself, because I knew that

The most exciting thing you could be was a poem,

My Grandma used to tell me

Do you remember the place I showed you?

About the Holy Water

I want you to try and find that Red Sea

That survives apocalypse.

That died when August shipwrecked at my feet.

Atlantis church on our shores,

You look similar enough to the last,

Inescapable and far,

So can you please take me back there Captain?

A phantom haunting us both.

I don’t know the route, can you take the wheel?

‘Jesus, Take The Wheel’ blasting,

Promise me that you won’t be disgusted,

Like a scar down my canyons.

That I’ve got curls in my mouth, and I have

Now my saltwater dilutes

White daydreams about your sickness, and

Born-again wounds of fever

Why do you keep looking at me blankly?

Whose blood is only my type.

You keep waiting for the answer to your

Pelican eyes, looking for

Scurvy, but we’re both going to die

Red in a different ocean,

With stuttering tremors up to our waists.

Without checking above deck.

Exclamation marks in your sky,

Echoing down my canyons.

Do you think you’ll see the world clearer

In my neck? Breathing and breathing and

Grieving something I’ve never seen;

Something that you’ve never seen.

Promise me you won’t be disgusted

That I’ve got curls in my mouth,

And salt in my seas, hoping that you’ll

Float. Snares in your stuttering,

Dripping down to your heel, then

Spat back onto my chest. Spit it.

Cotton balls on born-again scars,

But the blood’s not your type, only mine.

Fire, water, earth, air

Keep turning corners and all you’ll be able to find is

Archetypes strung together under a sky that only cares about

Reaching Heaven while demanding the pursuit of Nirvana.

Curry stain, runner-up sky, rusted zipper

Run it up, run them out, run your mouth, running out

Why are pandemics and protests the new parties?

Living in squares with stars on the TV and not in the sky,

Living in circles of masks traced and traced and traced.

Plymouth, Inverness, Galway, Scarborough

Citizenship is the trial and the crucifixion that only ends when

British bones hit British soil after a British life:

The train to Paris is acceptable, and Barcelona is a stretch,

But I think I like my little gridded collage, and I think I do too!

Blood creates itself, water dries itself up, none as thick as him

‘The 16 Year Old Supermodel Living in Mumbai’s Slums’

I feel so bad, like I do when I see a black-and-white ugly haircut.

So, tuesday evening, I tried to scroll through your blemishes,

But I started crying, just because your skin is clear and white.

Crushed cigarette, eternal drizzle, dilapidated brick, the cold

A slaughterhouse is only dangerous to the cattle;

Convergent evolution haunts every single pile of ash and

Every single city, when they try to become a diamond.

Cattle in the rough, keep eating the grass and not

The dreams of your single-minded friends in the corner store

Corner store? Is that what they even call it in the UK?

I just keep looking from eyes unplagued by whatever misery

Has led you here or led you to feel you had to stay.

Would you rather have a blind eye of selfish or helpless green?

Five fabric layers

Cutting through your collarbone

Settling on sweat

I know you’re not real

Because I can see your face

Leopard next to God

Noose is the neighbour’s

Judas tree, blurred coach window

Peeking through your eyes

Lovesick stigmata

Is freedom too great a cost?

Tell me the whole truth

Melted candle wax

Dripping down my hardened knees

Ninety degrees right

Sawdust spots of sun

Seep into quiet service;

Teach you how to kneel

Resurrected now

Salt-strings loose against red flakes

Warm cheek against mine

Drink you, swallow you

I can only hear your bells

Eleven seats down

Four stones on your back

I don’t want to hear the bells

Now your right hand man

‘So would you marry

A man or woman in the

Future, do you think?’

Cross out my forehead

A shudder from your stone chest

‘I’d marry a man’

Glass by the altar

You press my ear against it